#oneaday Day 880: Remakes and originals can and should coexist

Earlier today, the one and only Jeff Grubb of Giant Bomb posed the question "what game remakes have effectively replaced the original?" It's an interesting question, so I thought I'd take today to ponder it myself in a bit more detail than my skeet in reply to him.

Remakes are on everyone's mind right now because the Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is out tomorrow, and the reviews have been glowing. To most reviewers, it appears that nu-Ocarina is a respectful remake that simultaneously pays homage to the original and provide a solid, self-contained experience in its own right, accessible to newcomers as much as it is to series veterans — or, indeed, old farts like me who were There For It First Time Around.

My simple response to Jeff was that a good remake doesn't replace the original; it complements it. What happens next is down to the individual, with the remake pointedly not saying one way or the other is the definitive approach.

Someone who plays a remake could find themselves interested in the history of what they just played; having learned it is a remake of an earlier game, they could find themselves drawn down a rabbit-hole of investigating games from a different time — and, in the case of younger players, games that may well have been released before they were even born. This could, in turn, develop an interest in broader gaming history and retro gaming as a hobby — something which I, of course, would heartily encourage.

At the same time, someone who plays a remake could find themselves completely satisfied with the self-contained experience that the remake provides. They know it's a remake of an older thing, but they also know that it stands by itself and doesn't require or assume knowledge of said older thing. They can enjoy a brand-new, modern game that is informed by classic titles of the past, but not have to deal with all the challenges that looking into old games can present you with — whether that's dated visuals, lower quality sound, less refined controls and game design. These are not things that bother me personally, but I can imagine that someone who grew up with, say, the PlayStation 4 and Switch as their first gaming consoles might find it hard to go back to games from the original PlayStation and N64, for various reasons.

Then, of course, there are situations like the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, where what they're doing is not really a "remake" at all, but rather a considerably expanded retelling of a story that goes off in some interesting other directions. These can still be responded to in both of the above ways, however; some folks who came to Final Fantasy VII Remake first might find themselves curious to play the original Final Fantasy VII, while others will be happy with the modern games as their sole point of contact.

Of course, I would absolutely love it if all people were willing to dive back into gaming history and give older games the time of day. There's still a ton of value to be found in older games — even in ones that, for example, use control schemes that have long since been abandoned in favour of modern analogue controls.

Take the original Tomb Raider, for example. This is a game designed entirely around its rather rigid, clunky-by-modern-standards controls. It is a product of its time and represents a style of gameplay that we don't really have in the same form any more — but it's still perfectly playable if you meet it on its own terms and learn how to play it. At the same time, I understand completely why the more recent Tomb Raider games have gone in a more "modern third-person shooter" kind of angle. But one absolutely does not negate the other, at all.

I know not everyone is a fan of them, but I like remakes. They provide a new way to experience an old thing — and, if you were around for the old thing's original appearance, might just remind you why you used to like it so much. And, at the same time, they make the old thing much more accessible to newer or younger players. What happens from there is really up to them — but I hope it's the beginning of an enriching, fascinating journey of discovery.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 879: Pocket-sized

I mentioned a while back that I had got an Analogue Pocket, and I don't think I've written much about it as yet. So I might as well do that tonight!

The Analogue Pocket, for the unfamiliar, is a premium-grade (i.e. quite pricy) retro gaming handheld, fashioned in a similar mould to Nintendo's classic Game Boy (i.e. it's a vertical handheld) and featuring four face buttons (plus Start, Select and a Menu) button and two shoulder buttons. It features a cartridge slot that takes Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance cartridges, and can play these right out of the box. With optional adapters (which appear to be perpetually out of stock) you can also play Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket Colour, Atari Lynx and PC Engine/Turbografx-16.

Analogue Pocket has a couple of distinctive selling points. The first of these is its inordinately high-resolution (1600×1440) screen, which you might think is the last thing you need for retro games, but in fact it makes its benefits very clear almost immediately by accurately simulating the classic displays of the aforementioned handhelds — including the distinctive "dot matrix" look of the original Game Boy, the visible scanlines of the Game Gear and Lynx, and the "grid" pattern of the original Game Boy Colour screen. You can turn this feature off if you want, but it's implemented so well that it really does recapture the feeling of using the classic systems.

The second is that it is not a cheapo emulator handheld like the stuff from companies like Anbernic. It's an FPGA device, which means it emulates systems on a hardware level rather than simulating them in software. This, in theory, leads to much more accurate recreations of how the various systems work. Cores for the systems that take the aforementioned cartridges are built in to the Pocket, but the latest firmware updates allow you to install "openFPGA" cores on there, too, and these can be used with ROM files as well as original media. The openFPGA cores also cover consoles and computers as well as handhelds, allowing you to turn the Pocket into a portable powerhouse if you so desire — particularly if you pair it with its optional dock that allows you to connect it to a TV and use external peripherals.

It's an absolute delight to use. After a bit of fiddling around to get it set up — much less than a MiSTer, particularly now there are helpful tools available, though of course you have to avoid the AI shit — it's a wonderful bit of kit. Quick to start up and jump into a game on any of the supported systems, and pretty much flawless performance on almost everything I've played. The only games I've had issues with are a couple of Lynx titles — Gauntlet: The Third Encounter has some iffy screen tearing due to an odd refresh rate (plus the core doesn't seem to support display modes when you rotate the screen, as is necessary for that game) and Rampart refuses to display the image that is supposed to come up before the "rebuild" section but is otherwise fully playable — and everything else has been just as if I'd bunged in a real cartridge and was playing on a real system.

Its ease of use and portability means that I'm very likely to pick it up and just have a play with it when I'm at a loose end — and in doing so I've already discovered some delightful handheld games that I'd like to play more of. Plus SNES, Mega Drive and PC Engine games look amazing on it.

In short, this thing wasn't cheap, but it was a very worthwhile investment. If you enjoy handheld and retro gaming, I highly recommend one.

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#oneaday Day 878: I could probably play DOOM forever

DOOM is one of my all-time favourite games. I fell in love with it immediately when I played the shareware version all those years ago — though I never convinced my parents to get me a Registered version — and, over the years, I reckon it is one of the games I have come back to more times than any other.

As you can probably imagine, it is an enormous thrill and an immensely satisfying career moment to have been part of an official DOOM release — in this case, the Evercade version, for which I put together the text for the manual (paying homage to the original version's documentation), the digital descriptions (the stuff you see on the Evercade menu) and worked as part of the dev team, testing out various features and providing feedback.

We were working on this for so long, along with Banjo-Kazooie, that it felt like we'd never be able to just settle down and enjoy the fruits of our labours. But finally, I have my copy of The DOOM Collection for Evercade, along with three Evercade Nexus handhelds (plus all the myriad other Evercades I already have) and I can, at last, sit back and… well, play DOOM again.

It will probably not surprise you to hear that DOOM still holds up very well. I am currently in the middle of playing through on the Ultra-Violence difficulty level, which, I must confess to my shame, is actually a relatively new experience to me; traditionally I have stuck to Hurt Me Plenty and still find some parts pretty challenging. However, I've been really enjoying playing on Ultra-Violence; it really does ramp up the action and make things even more exciting, and it kind of feels like a brand new experience, even though I'm just going through familiar levels for the umpteenth time.

That said, there's still a fair old chunk of DOOM that I either haven't played or am just less familiar with. I've only played DOOM II through once in my life, for example, and I've never played the two parts of Final DOOM. I do have it in my head that DOOM II and everything that came after is significantly harder than base game DOOM — and I'm probably right about that — but I have successfully beaten No Rest for the Living and SIGIL in the not-too-distant past, so it's not as if I'm incapable of meeting these greater challenges. So I'm going to work my way through and enjoy every moment of this wonderful version of DOOM we've put together.

And this isn't the end of it, either; we have some really interesting plans for what we can continue to do with DOOM, which will likely show up at some point next year. We have a lot of other work to do first, though, so in the meantime I'm going to kick back on the sofa, grab my new Evercade wireless controller and once again indulge in one of my all-time favourite games — one I don't think I will ever tire of.

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#oneaday Day 877: A quiet life versus loneliness

Not for the first time, I find myself contemplating shutting down my social media accounts. I don't have many of them left any more; I have a Facebook account, which I was only really keeping around because I was an admin of the Evercade page, but no longer really have that responsibility, and a Bluesky account, which I'll talk more about in a moment.

Facebook, at this point, I probably can just get rid of. I'm not sure if my WhatsApp account is connected to it (I don't think it is?) but other than that, I have absolutely no reason to use it. No-one speaks to me on there, I don't like using it and it is, thus, largely useless to me. That should be fairly straightforward; my only real hesitation is the aforementioned professional responsibility, as there are times where I may have to hop in and cover moderation if no-one else is available to do so.

Bluesky is a more difficult one. For many folks, Bluesky has taken the place of Twitter, and that is the primary reason I have been using it. The combination of short-form posts and ease of starting conversations with people you follow has long been an appealing element, just like it once was with Twitter. But at the same time, Bluesky, being a heavily left-leaning platform, is very much home to some of the worst kinds of behaviour that turned me off Twitter in the first place. (The behaviours that are keeping me off Twitter now are, of course, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, and far more odious. But still.) While I, too, am a left-leaning individual, there's a particular breed of leftie that likes to make a lot of noise about whatever their hobby horse of the day is, and it can get very tiring when it feels like there is never a moment's peace.

Thing is, many of these issues are valid things to care about, but they often end up becoming "guilt by association" exercises, with other people and organisations getting drawn into the crossfire just because they might have once, in the past, crossed paths with whatever the target of the hour is. At that point, people start getting hurt; people who don't deserve to be hurt. And that's the biggest thing that makes me contemplate shutting things down. I am one of those people who have been hurt by situations like this, not because I (or any organisations I am attached to) have done anything wrong, but because at some point we have crossed paths with the target of someone's ire.

This might sound pretty cut and dry. I'm having negative feelings about Bluesky, so why don't I just jack it in?

Well, because for all its irritating features, it is the one and pretty much only place online where I feel like I have a connection to other people. There are a few people I know there; there are a few people I have got to know there; there are a few people I would like to know there. Cutting my connection to all those people because I am pissed off and exhausted at the behaviour of some other users feels… disproportionate and excessive.

The alternative, of course, is to take steps to remove the people whose behaviour I object to from my feed. Bluesky has numerous ways of doing that, including muting individual comment threads, muting users and blocking users. Honestly, that is probably the answer in this situation, but I'm always a bit hesitant about this, because in many cases, the people who have been exhibiting behaviour I object to aren't like that all the time; some of them are even folks that I like. But I don't feel comfortable confronting them on things like this, because, like I say, I don't necessarily think the core of what they're arguing is wrong; hurting other people unfairly, however, is. And that nuance often tends to get lost in online disagreements. I've had enough negative experiences in the past to know that for absolute sure.

So I sit here, with no particularly ideal solutions at hand. Close Bluesky, and end up feeling completely lonely and isolated, because no-one checks in on people if they're not on social media any more? (I've tried this before. It's like you cease to exist, even if you're doing something like I'm doing here, and updating a blog regularly.) Mute, unfollow or block the offenders and risk kicking off arguments that don't need to happen, and which will inevitably leave me feeling worse? Or just suck it up, recognise that I have a difference of opinion with some people, continue to catch occasional strays and feel miserable and uneasy?

I just want a Third Place where people are chill, man. There are fuck all left in the real world, and it's starting to feel like there are fuck all left online, either. I will never forgive them for taking 1up and its club pages from us.

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#oneaday Day 876: It's okay for all this to bother you

Apologies for the Rage Explosion yesterday, that just needed to come out. So I let it. Because you know what? Sometimes it is healthy to do that. Sometimes it is good to acknowledge that Shit Going On In The World is actually bothering you, even if it's not something that is necessarily happening to you, directly.

This was the primary subject we talked about in therapy this week. I have been struggling with a general sense of fatigue and depression for a while now, and since there's not really much going "wrong" with my personal or professional lives right now, the only thing I can really attribute it to is a continual sense of being completely and utterly fed up with, as the cliché goes, "(waves arms around) ALL THIS".

It is easy to get yourself into a mindset where you start telling yourself that you should not waste time and energy worrying about things which are not directly and immediately affecting you, personally. Focus on your own general wellbeing and being a good person, the conventional wisdom goes, and you'll be happy, even if no-one else is.

Except that isn't true. No man is an island, and in this interconnected modern world, it is very fucking difficult to disconnect completely from What Is Happening In The World. Not just because we are perpetually bombarded with it thanks to a combination of traditional and social media, but because What Is Happening In The World is having a marked, measurable and demonstrable impact on the basics of human interaction: the way we are with one another, the way we treat one another and the way we talk to one another.

Part of the reason that All of This™ is so exhausting is because it often feels like there is no escape from it. These days, even small, private little communities primarily drawn together for friendship and mutual support reasons often end up devolving, at some point, into arguments about politics, AI and all the other shit. I have a few spaces online that have remained mercifully immune to that — but just as many where I simply don't want to raise my head and show my face any more, because I just cannot be arsed battling my way through all the yelling and the arguing and all the inexplicable water carrying for big corporations who very much do not have our best interests at heart.

Sociologists often suggest a lot of today's problems stem from the lack of A Third Place for most people: somewhere you can go that is not your home or your work. For many of us now, our home and are work are already the same thing, which has its own issues, of course, but with the massive decline in Third Places for people to go and do things and interact with other three-dimensional people, it's perhaps no surprise that the overall feelings of unrest that everyone is experiencing come out in the way they talk to one another online. After all, the person you're yelling at isn't "real", are they? They're just text on your screen.

Anyway, my thoughts have meandered through that somewhat, but the upshot of it all is simple. It's okay to feel run down, burnt out and fatigued by What Is Happening In The World, even if it's not something that appears to directly affect you. Because it does affect you. It affects where you feel safe, where you feel comfortable, where and how you want to express yourself. And if you find that The Way Things Just Are Now makes you feel like the number of places where you feel safe, comfortable and able to express yourself has contracted… well, you're not alone. That's very much where I am right now. And I'm not going to pretend it's otherwise.

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#oneaday Day 875: Fuck you, Sam Altman

Speaking with YouTuber Cheeky Pint, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said that "from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

In response — and I appreciate I am a nobody, and that Clammy Sammy will never see this — I say the following.

Fuck you, Sam Altman. Fuck you five ways to Sunday. Fuck you for ruining the exciting world of tech with your garbage hallucinating "AI can make mistakes" chatbots, which is all that fucking tech seems to be now. Fuck you for ruining the world of creativity with your slop-peddling six-fingered piss-filter image models. Fuck you for ruining the world of music by stealing the world's compositions and allowing people with no taste to churn out song-shaped objects and claim they are being creative. Fuck you for ruining the world of writing with your cliché-spouting text generation models. Fuck you for taking the em-dash, the rule of threes and rhetorical questions from writers, who now cannot use any of those things without being accused of "being AI".

Fuck you for making my day job harder with your cuntish technology driving up not just RAM prices, but all tech prices. Yes, that's right, fuck you for being the one who fucking created this "supply constrained environment" that no-one asked for, and which didn't need to happen. Fuck you for your greed and avarice making it a thousand times harder for us to bring simple joy to people through the things we make. Fuck you for making it so there is so much distrust in the space we work in. Fuck you for the times we have had to fend off harassment and threats because some cunt we worked with used your garbage tech without telling us.

Fuck you for ruining my hobbies. Fuck you for even suggesting that people should not own and enjoy their own computer. Fuck you for corrupting a space that was once devoted to the joy of celebrating the past and learning from it with slopped-up, barely functional projects that no-one in their right mind will ever want to maintain. Fuck you for discouraging the people who still want to do things using their brain. Fuck you for the million and one arguments that have erupted in social media replies, comments sections, Discord servers, WhatsApp groups and forums over this useless garbage, thanks to the army of sycophants queueing up to fellate your robo-cock in exchange for seemingly no discernible benefit whatsoever. Fuck you for making it so I can't be excited about a new announcement of anything any more without checking to see whether or not it's been churned out by the slop machine.

Fuck you for what you've done to the world. Fuck you for the cognitive surrender you have triggered, the AI psychosis you've nurtured and the people you've killed with your irresponsible garbage technology. Fuck you for the mistrust you've sown, the ticking time bomb you have made the economy, the wedges you've driven between groups of friends, families and those with common interests. Fuck you for making everything more expensive. Fuck you for depriving people of joy. Fuck you for your self-important arrogance in thinking you — you! a massive cunt! — are the one to lead humanity to a better tomorrow.

Fuck you, Sam Altman. I hope an entire data centre falls on your stupid face, and that everyone who has been saving old RAM sticks "just in case" takes a moment to jam them right up your fucking arse if you're so desperate for them.

Also, Wario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and everyone else who has made 2020-2026 what it has been so far? Fuck you for all the above, too. History will hold you accountable for the damage you have done to our world, and to humanity as a whole.

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#oneaday Day 874: Mon capitaine

Patrick Stewart has passed away at the age of 86. This one really, really hurts, so I thought I'd talk a bit about that today, since as I type this, the news has pretty much literally just broken.

Patrick Stewart is one of those actors who, once you had let him into your life in any way, remained in your heart constantly. His warmth, the depth of the characterisation he brought to his roles, and the way he always just seemed to be a generally affable sort of person; he was that unique breed of individual where you felt like he was a far-off friend, even if you'd never met him.

Like most people, I first became aware of him through Star Trek: The Next Generation. Watching this was something of a ritual in my household growing up, because BBC2 constantly showed episodes of it (usually out of order) at 6pm, which was around the time we were usually settling down to have some dinner in the kitchen. We'd pop the little TV in the corner of the room on, eat our food and spend some quality family time together enjoying the show — often lightly poking fun at aspects of it. My Dad always made a joke of how he found it frustrating that every episode they "cheated" — his way of referring to the series' iconic "technobabble" — but it was just a light-hearted jab; we all loved that show, and it brought us together.

I think in some respects Patrick Stewart's depiction of Captain Jean-Luc Picard resonated so deeply with me because, in many ways, he reminded me of my Dad. Not in terms of looks or being a space captain or anything, but there was just sort of something about Picard's manner which always, in a strangely ill-definable way, reminded me of my father. I can't really explain it. It was just sort of a feeling. And, if anything, I became more aware (or conscious, I should perhaps say) of this in relatively recent years. Make no mistake, though; Picard was Space Dad.

I think part of the reason why Stewart's passing has hit me so deeply — and this is a difficult thing to contemplate, let alone write about, so forgive me, but now is the time if ever there was one — is because I am keenly aware that my real, actual, non-Space parents aren't getting any younger, and there is going to be a time at some point in the future where I will have to come to terms with a world where they aren't there any more. It's not something anybody ever wants to have to think about, it's something that I hope isn't going to happen any time soon, and it's something that, to be perfectly honest, terrifies me. But when someone like Patrick Stewart passes on, one can't help but contemplate questions of mortality, for one's own self, and for the ones close to you.

He was a presence that, in some strange way, I think we all thought would always be present in our lives, somehow, and I guess he still is, thanks to his magnificent body of work. But the world is a bleaker, darker place without our Captain, and it feels like all the "good ones" are being taken from us unjustly, while the one octogenarian that everyone really wants to keel over dead just keeps on chugging along, shitting his pants and dribbling the product all over the world.

But let's not sully the memory of a great man with frustration and anger at a creature who is the exact opposite. Instead, I suggest you raise a glass, bellow "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS" at your cat and salute the finest Captain — no, the finest role model — that Starfleet ever gave us… and a man who, in our world, we can honestly say that everyone is going to mourn the loss of.

Farewell, mon capitaine. May you find peace beyond the stars.

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#oneaday Day 873: Enjoying the whole thing

A while back, I wrote about how (relatively) few people finish games these days. And last night, I played through all of Mappy Kids on Evercade, a game that I've had a copy of for several years now, but which had somehow never played through to completion.

I had a really good time! And thinking about that has got me pondering how it would do us all good to just slow down a bit, pick and choose the things that we want to enjoy more carefully, and then actually enjoy those things to the fullest.

To be fair, this is something that I already do. A big change in my game-playing habits occurred… probably in the late '90s or so, but really in earnest from around 2010. I started finishing games. In my defence, earlier games from the 8-bit and 16-bit home computer eras were extremely difficult or even impossible to finish, but there came a point where it became practical, desirable and fun to play a complete game through from start to finish.

I don't know if it was the first game I ever completed, but one that really sticks in my mind was Super Mario World on the SNES. I got to the ending of that game and was blown away by how elaborate the credits sequence was. Of course, in modern terms, it's actually pretty simple — just a parade back through previous backgrounds, showing off all the sprites in the game — but back when I first reached it on my own, it was an incredible moment. Not all games have a satisfying ending like this, of course — particularly when you look at earlier titles — but there's always a special kind of thrill that comes with knowing you have beaten a game and seen everything it has to offer.

Since that time — and especially since Final Fantasy VII showed me how epic a finale sequence could truly be — I've really made an effort to try and beat the vast majority of the games I play. Except I've sort of fallen into a pattern of thinking that certain experiences are inherently more "worthwhile" in this regard; usually based primarily on how narrative-centric they are, and how long they are.

It's an easy mindset to fall into. Retro games in particular can feel rather "disposable" at times, given how easy it is these days to load up a handheld or emulation station with every game ever released for a variety of platforms, then promptly never settle on one thing to play, dipping into hundreds of things for a few minutes at a time and never really having a meaningful experience with any of them.

What you have to remember, though, is that every single entry in that massive ROMset you acquired via questionable means was once an individual release that cost anywhere up to £50 or £60. And back when that was the case, you made those games last. You made those games matter.

It's not hard to see how one can fall into a mindset where you inadvertently devalue short-form experiences or retro titles — particularly as most retro titles, when they do get an official rerelease these days, tend to come as big bundle deals with tens to hundreds of other titles alongside them for the price of one "big" game. I'm conscious of this with what I do for the day job: Evercade cartridges represent excellent value, particularly when compared to buying original media for platforms like the NEOGEO, but when you have 5, 10, 20 or more games on one cartridge, I don't blame anyone for treating the whole thing like a casual buffet when what some of these games really demand — or crave is perhaps a better word — is for someone to sit down with them for a protracted amount of time and take them seriously.

I wonder how many other people have had Namco Museum Collection 1 in their Evercade lineup since launch and have never played Mappy Kids all the way through from start to finish. Turns out it's quite easy, and pretty short! But I don't regret the time I spent playing it through last night; I ended up with a much better understanding of what the game is doing, and had an enjoyable, coherent experience as a result. Also the music in that game is brilliant.

And what about the more substantial games in that collection? I genuinely do wonder how many folks have got beyond the second mission in Metal Marines, because I know from firsthand experience how easy it is to sit down, play the straightforward but satisfying first mission and then think "oh, I better move on to something else".

Why? Why had you "better" move on to something else? I don't have a good answer as to why our brains work like that these days — other than to acknowledge that the modern media and particularly online landscape encourages this sort of attention-deficit behaviour, where everything is content, and all of the content you consume must be varied and engaging for a couple of minutes at a time, before something in your mind goes "NEXT!" and demands something new.

It takes work to resist that. But it's worthwhile to do so. If, in your travels through ROMsets, Evercade collections, retro compilations or anything similar, you have come across something that really looked cool or appealing in some way, but you only ended up spending 5-10 minutes with it, I encourage you to dedicate at least an evening to exploring it further. You might just be surprised at how much you can make one of these individual experiences really matter and feel worthwhile. Yep, even seemingly simple arcade or Atari 2600 games.

Plus, the bonus effect is that if you're one of those people who bemoans the fact that you "never have any time" to play video games any more, most retro games are pretty short! I beat Mappy Kids in a fraction of a single evening, and you can too!

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#oneaday Day 872: Resonance

I've been really enjoying Final Fantasy Resonance so far. I'm only about five hours in thus far, but already I can tell this is going to be a good time. And I hope it's not an isolated example of what it represents.

For the unfamiliar, Final Fantasy Resonance is an adaptation of the defunct mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. This was, it will not surprise you to hear, a free-to-play gacha game, but when I gave it a try on its original release, I actually found it had some redeeming features — most notably the fact that it didn't seem ashamed of being a video game, which a lot of mobile titles do, inexplicably.

Anyway, I always thought it was a bit of a shame that what, in my limited experience, appeared to be a surprisingly decent Final Fantasy story was trapped in free-to-play gacha hell — particularly as the soundtrack was awesome. Alas, though, it was not to last; the worldwide game shut down in 2024 and the Japanese version a year later, leaving the tales of Rain and company forever consigned to oblivion.

Except! They aren't! Because Final Fantasy Resonance takes the first main story arc of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and adapts it into a proper, non-gacha, non-free-to-play game. And boy, they've done a great job with it, too — to such a degree that this stands up remarkably well as a possible future direction Square Enix might want to (but almost definitely won't) take the mainline series in for its next installments.

Final Fantasy is a series that has never been afraid of reinventing itself. Supposedly Hironobu Sakaguchi's attitude to the series could be summed up as "if it's not new, it's not Final Fantasy", and this would explain why every entry in the series to date has done something fairly to radically different from its predecessors. I, personally, love this, and have had great fun with the whole series, even the entries that "popular opinion" (spit) won't stop whining and moaning and crying about, like VIII, XIII, XV and XVI.

What Square Enix has basically done with Final Fantasy Resonance is go "all right you whining fucking babies, here is a very traditional Final Fantasy with random battles and little dudes lining up to take it in turns to whack monsters, only with very pretty modern visuals and an amazing soundtrack, are you fucking happy now?!" And I sincerely, absolutely hope that anyone who has ever complained about "the way Final Fantasy has been going" at any point over the last 30 years has picked this game up, started playing and gone "…well, all right, then, fair play". Because it is absolutely what people have been clamouring for, for decades at this point. So if they're not playing this, they don't get to talk about Final Fantasy ever again.

It's not just noteworthy for this angle, though. It's also just a damn fine RPG, and incorporates a lot of the elements I really like in a game like this. The turn-based combat is just turn-based combat without any QTEs or parrying or other bullshit like that. (I liked Expedition 33 well enough, but I could have absolutely done without its Souls-inspired elements.) It has a fun progression system that takes elements from Final Fantasy V, VI and IX, whereby you learn abilities from having "Visions" (actually characters from other Final Fantasy games) equipped, and once an ability is learned you can equip it independently of having the Vision equipped, allowing you to build your characters as you see fit. It has optional fast travel, allowing you to either journey between locations the old-fashioned way, getting into random battles on the way, or simply zapping to a location you need to get to for a quest. And it has Tales-style skits where your party members chat about things while you wander around on the world map.

The story also seems solid so far. It's oddly jarring to have a protagonist that is very… 16 to 32-bit in terms of how idealistic and positive he is, but it's a welcome, nostalgic feeling after so many games that are deliberately dour in tone. That's not to say the game doesn't have any darkness, either; indeed, I'm still in the first chapter, and there has already been one impressively fucked-up moment that I can only assume will get resolved more conclusively at a much later time.

Anyway, I'm having a blast with it so far, and thus I'm going to go and spend a bit more quality time with it right now. Cue That Fanfare…

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#oneaday Day 871: How Colleen got her groove back

You see, it's funny, 'cause the original book was How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and Stella was the internal name for the Atari 2600, but I am more of an Atari 8-bit computer man, and the internal name for the Atari 800 was Colleen. Do you get it? No? Never mind. It made me happy, and that's what's important.

Anyway, yeah, I thought I'd update and reflect on my decision to refocus my YouTube channel back on the Atari computers that have always been so important to me, and it's been going well! Viewing figures for the last few videos have been very good (even bearing in mind YouTube changing the way it counts views a little while back), and I've been getting some good comments on each and every video, with a lot of regular viewers coming back for each new video.

In other words, I think this was the right decision. The temptation was always there to want to cover as much stuff as possible on YouTube, but in doing that you risk a few things: never being able to cover anything in as much depth as you want; never being satisfied that you've covered every thing you want; and never being able to nail down a consistent, recurring audience. Because while "retro gamers with broad interests" is definitely an audience, on a platform as saturated as YouTube is, specialising really does seem to be the way forward. As with, I would argue, pretty much all kinds of media; sadly, the mainstream video games media never learned this lesson and now we barely have any. But I digress.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to share my recent videos on the off-chance you've been reading this for God knows how many days and you've still never paid my YouTube channel a visit. I've somehow made 1.2 thousand videos on there over the years — although I will grant you that there are a chunk of those which are nothing but raw gameplay. The vast majority involve either my "live" commentary, or a reading of something I've written, though. The former, with a brief(ish) introduction to give some historical context, are where I've settled on what I enjoy doing the most; the latter occasionally break out and do very well, but the former is, for me, the more sustainable format that I can keep on doing without it feeling like work. Because I want YouTube to be a fun hobby, not something that becomes a second job.

Anyway, with that in mind, I don't make a lot of effort pushing these videos outside of their immediate audience and a cursory share on Bluesky when they're first published. I frankly cannot be arsed with all the promo work you're "supposed" to do if you're trying to build an audience, and to be honest, I've never really been trying to build an audience. All I'm doing with YouTube is doing something that amuses and entertains me, and if people happen to stumble across it and find it entertaining or informative, so much the better. Same as what I do with my writing, really; I have no great designs on being "famous" or anything, but it is nice when someone happens across your work and is able to take something worthwhile away from it.

Enough of that, though. Here are some videos about old games on older computers.

The rebooted Atari A to Z series, focusing on Atari 8-bit computers, began with a look at a game I've been meaning to cover for ages: Astro Chase by First Star Software. This is a cool multidirectional shoot 'em up with some flashy graphics and cutscenes. It even made it into arcades… kind of, anyway. It's a great game, but one I've just never gotten around to until now.

Next up is Batty Builders, a game by English Software, a company that was renowned for its high-quality output on Atari 8-bit in the early to mid 1980s. Batty Builders is an intriguing take on the action-puzzle game, and pre-empts pretty much every other "falling block" puzzle game I can think of with its own distinctive twist on the formula. Its balance is questionable, but it's a game I've always been very fond of.

Then we come to Clowns and Balloons, a game by the prolific Frank Cohen, and one of the first games I remember playing on Atari 8-bit. It's a simple game about bouncing a clown on a trampoline to pop a bunch of balloons, but it's well-presented, looks and sounds great for the time, and plays well. This is one I regularly go back to if I'm just playing Atari 8-bit for fun of an evening.

Next we have Desmond's Dungeon, a game I remember hearing the name of a lot, but which I had never looked into. Loosely (very loosely) based on the arcade game Bagman, or at least modern commentators tend to conjecture, it's an arcade-style game with some good presentation, solid mechanics and decent overall gameplay. Perhaps a bit repetitive over the long term, but it at least introduces some intriguing elements to the mix as you progress through its difficulty levels.

Archipelagos is the game that kicked off my new "season" of Atari ST A to Z. This is a game I always thought looked amazing back in the day, but could never picture how it actually played. Turns out it's pretty simple, but thoroughly compelling and very atmospheric. This is one I intend to spend some more time with by myself now I've made the video.

Eastern Front (1941) is a wargame designed to be deep and complex, but also accessible and easy to control. Sure enough, it is very straightforward to get started in, but the intricacies of play could keep one busy for a very long time indeed. Suffice to say as a wargame newbie and strategic idiot, I barely scratch the surface of its possibilities in this video, but it should be enough for those interested to "get" what it is going for. Noteworthy for being the creation of the immensely talented and very clever Chris Crawford, who produced some of the most interesting, deep, inventive games on the Atari 8-bit.

We return to a classic Atari series with Blasteroids, the third entry in the Asteroids series, released during the "Atari Games" era. The Atari ST port of this game is pretty solid, though Atari Games pulling a lot of its usual bullshit — tutorial messages, constantly draining health, harsh difficulty spikes — does mean it puts up a bit of a fight. I have always been rather fond of this game, though, and it was nice to revisit it.

Finally, for now, we have Firefleet, a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up by the same guy who gave us Batty Builders. It's riffing on the Caverns of Mars formula, but has plenty of its own things that make it appealing and interesting. Caverns of Mars is, overall, the better game, for myriad reasons, but this is certainly an interesting title that those who have the patience to deal with its difficulty wall seem to really like.

And that's that for now. I have another Atari ST video in the pipe ready to go out later this week, then at the weekend I'll likely be making some more videos. I'm settling into a good rhythm of doing these, now, so hopefully these will be reasonably regular. I hope you enjoy them, whether you're a newcomer to my channel or you've been stopping by for ages. And if you've never experienced the games of the Atari 8-bit and ST computers, well, I have a huge library of both for you to take a look at on the channel!

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